Tuesday, September 8, 2015

Traveling
Pastor Don Piper was thinking about
having his own congregation on his way home from a Christian
convention when fate intervened in tragic fashion. His car was
crushed so badly by a tractor trailer that he was declared dead right
on the spot by first responders who couldn't find a pulse.

Since
the cops were in no hurry to extract him from the twisted wreckage,
he was still lying there over an hour later, when a minister (Michael
Harding) passing by the accident scene decided to stop and pray for
the repose of his soul. But upon approaching the auto, instead of a
corpse, lo and behold, the Good Samaritan found the supposedly
deceased to be very much alive. In
fact, Pastor Piper was faintly singing a Gospel spiritual, despite
his considerable loss of blood. A rescue team with the jaws of life
was immediately summoned and he was soon extracted and rushed to the
hospital in excruciating pain.
And although he would fight to survive for the sake of his wife (Kate
Bosworth) and their three kids (Hudson Meek, Bobby Batson and
Elizabeth Hunter), Don was actually torn over whether he really
wanted to live or die. For, during his near-death experience on the
side of the road, he'd briefly entered the proverbial Pearly Gates.

There,
he not only experienced an unparalleled feeling of never-ending
bliss, but enjoyed reunions with a number of dearly-departed loved
ones, including his great-grandmother (Sallye McDougald Hooks) and a
couple of childhood friends (Matthew Bauman and Trevor Allen Martin).
By comparison, being back on Earth was relatively painful, given the
34 operations he needed to undergo over the next several months to
fix torn muscles, disfigurement, broken bones and shattered disks. Thanks
to the power of prayer, Pastor Piper did ultimately recover. But
rather than open his own church, he wrote a best-seller recounting
his entering the Gates of Heaven as well as his subsequent
resurrection. Directed by Michael Polish (The Astronaut Farmer) 90
Minutes in Heaven proves to be a pretty palatable modern parable,
given that the title sort of serves as a spoiler. Of course, it helps
tremendously to be a person a faith, though this is one Christian
flick that has the potential to cut across demos. A goner
granted a miraculous reprieve
by God ostensibly to let us all know that paradise really exists.

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The Sly Fox Film Reviews publishes the content of film critic Kam Williams. Voted Most Outstanding Journalist of the Decade by the Disilgold Soul Literary Review in 2008, Kam Williams is a syndicated film and book critic who writes for 100+ publications around the U.S., Europe, Asia, Africa, Canada and the Caribbean. He is a member of the New York Film Critics Online, the NAACP Image Awards Nominating Committee and Rotten Tomatoes.

In addition to a BA in Black Studies from Cornell, he has an MA in English from Brown, an MBA from The Wharton School, and a JD from Boston University. Kam lives in Princeton, NJ with his wife and son.